Path to Condition-Based Maintenance via Drone Solutions

Essential industries that deal with infrastructure maintenance like utilities, construction, and transportation face the increasing challenge of increasing scope with fewer resources while trying to reduce risk to their organizations. As infrastructure ages, failure is not an option, and many are turning to technologies such as robotics and data analytics to alleviate the burden on their staff. The future of infrastructure monitoring will lie in AI and autonomy, which will enable these industries to go from having some drones in a department to scaling remote operations and fundamentally transforming their workflows. This presentation will connect the problems that utilities face, from budget and resource constraints and aging infrastructure and workforce, to external demands such as stakeholder expectations, regulatory compliance, climate change/emergency response, and digital transformation. We will walk through a step by step journey of implementing and scaling a drones and remote operations program into true operational workflow, and examine detailed use cases at Pacific Gase & Electric, such as inspections inside a radiological controlled area for a nuclear facility, storm restoration and storm event response, inspections for condition based maintenance, and land management.